Mack Calvin Hired At Dominguez?
Maybe, But Not Final Yet--(Aug. 13, 2001)

Mack Calvin perhaps best known as the type of
player who created havoc with his speed and tenacity in a long college and professional
playng career, is being actively considered by the school district to become the next
boys' basketball coach at Compton Dominguez High School, replacing Russell Otis, who was
fired this past spring. According to published reports in the Los Angeles Times
written by Ben Bolch, and in the Long Beach Press Telegram written by Ted Kian, he has
either been "hired" (Times) or is being considered for the job, but not yet
hired (LB PT).

According to the PT, Dominguez High principal Kelcey
Richardson has "recommended that Mack Calvin take over as head coach of the school's
boys basketball program." Apparently Calvin does not have a valid teaching
credential but could be hired as a "walk-on" coach according to Dr. Keith
Beeman, associate superintendent for human resources and employee development for the CUSD
who was interviewed by Kian. Richardson reportedly declined to comment on the actual
situation and refered all questions to Beeman. Beeman told Kian that Calvin still has to
be approved by the Compton Unified School Board before he can be hired. The PT
didn't speak with Calvin, but the Times' Bolch did, and he was told by Calvin that he's
already been hired for the job.

Either way, it looks like Mack Calvin is probably going to
be coaching at Dominguez this season and Russell Otis won't. Although Russell Otis,
the former Dons' coach who led them to three consecutive State Championships, reportedly
sent a letter to the Compton Unified School District seeking reinstatement following his
acquittal on sexual misconduct charges, many in the legal profession have speculated
that Otis' request for reinstatement was merely posturing for an anticipated wrongful
termination lawsuit against the District. Currently, Otis is reported to still be in
contention for the head coaching job at Lynwood HS, but telephone calls to the school's
co-principal with oversight for athletics, Jesse Jones, who is involved in the decision of
whether to retain the current coaches or to hire Otis, were not returned. The
Press-Telegram has reported that a decision will be made by Lynwood on whether to retain
the current coaches perhaps as soon as the end of this week.

If Calvin is hired at Dominguez he will take over a program
which has won three consecutive State Championships, and which was ranked as the No. 1
team in the nation by USA Today two years ago. But the question of which players
will still be there, other than the football players who might come out for the team at
Dominguez, is largely unanswered. According to a published report in the
Long Beach Press Telegram by Ted Kian, both Bobby Jones (6'-7" Sr. F) and
Keion Kindred (6'-2" Sr. PG) are undecided about where they will attend school, and
have said that if Otis is hired at Lynwood that they will transfer. If Otis is not
hired at Lynwood then it appears Long Beach Poly may be the leader if Jones does indeed
transfer from Dominguez. Samir Hernandez (6'-8" Sr. F) who was invited to play
this summer at the USA Basketball Youth Develpment Festival in Colorado, has reportedly
decided to enroll at Gardena Serra, and others have made their intentions known that they
will leave as well. Darius Sanders (6'-5" Sr. F) played this summer with
Compton Centennial and could wind up there, and Travon Free (6'-7" Jr. F) has
reportedly transferred to Verbum Dei where he will join Utah-bound Richard Chaney
(6'-5" Sr. G/F)--that is, depending on who the coaching staff is at Verbum Dei (an
issue that is reportedly unsettled right now as well).

But Calvin will try to convince the present players for
Dominguez to stick around. And in the process, it's probably safe to say that
one shouldn't underestimate the power of the Nike "Grassroots" prior sponsorship
of the Dons' program to be instrumental in that process. Even without their marquee
franchise player, Tyson Chandler, who will be on the Chicago Bulls' roster this season,
and even without Otis, a longtime paid Nike consultant, there's still a Nike
connection with Calvin getting the job: That's because Don Crenshaw, long been
affiliated with Nike and one of the people responsible for running the Grassroots program
and the Nike All-American Camp, is also a longtime friend and former USC teammate of Mack
Calvin's. So whatever influence the shoe company giant can wield might still wind up
benefitting a Dons program that many this summer may have prematurely begun to write off.

So what do we know about Mack Calvin? Actually there's
quite a bit of information about him on the internet. So we went looking and
compiled this brief biographical sketch for a player and coach who was he was a Long Beach
playing legend, who had a remarkable college career, followed by a professional playing
career of 13 years, followed by high school, college, NBA coaching experience. In
short, he's been just about everywhere one could be in the basketball world:

Affectionaly known as "The Bug", the 6'-0"
former pro player and college standout guard ranks 8th in all-time scoring in the old ABA,
having scored 10,620 points in an ABA-playing career which lasted from 1969 through the
merger of that league in 1976, and continuing on through the 1983 season with the
NBA. Calvin holds a couple of other interesting records both in the ABA and the NBA.
He is among only 9 other players in the history of pro basketball in the U.S. to
play professionally in the U.S. for 9 different franchises in a career. (If you're really
interested who holds the all-time record for most teams in a career, it's Chucky Brown,
who played for 11 different teams).

Mack began his major college career as a star for USC's
Trojans under head coach Bob Boyd. Prior to that, the Long Beach Poly graduate was a
junior college standout at Long Beach City College. Calvin, a Texas native, while at
USC was a two-time winner of the Ernie Holbrook Memorial Award (Most Inspirational Trojan
player) in 1968 and 1969, was named to the First Team on what was then the
"All-Pac-8" Conference Basketball Team in 1969, and helped lead the
Trojans in his final season to a third place finish in the conference. (Of interest is
that that USC team also featured Nike Grassroots' Don Crenshaw, who has long been
associated with securing the Nike contract for Russell Otis at Dominguez. Crenshaw
won the Harold Jones Memorial Award for the most improved player in 1969).

After a distinguished career at USC, Calvin was drafted in
the NBA (in the 14th round by the LA Lakers) but would have to wait 9 more years before
becoming a Laker). Instead, he was drafted by and signed with the old ABA. Of
the 9 teams he played for during his professional career, 5 of them were in the ABA (the
Stars, the Florida Floridians, the Larry Brown-coached Carolina Cougars, the Denver
Nuggets, and the Virginia Squires). He also played for the LA Lakers, the San
Antonio Spurs, the Utah Jazz and the Cleveland Cavaliers. While in the ABA, he was
known for creating havoc on the court defensively and his excellent ball-handling and
free-throw shooting. For a complete record of Calvin's accomplishments in the ABA,
as well as the reasons why he was named to the Top 30 ABA Players of All-Time at the 1997
reunion of the ABA, there's some great information at the "Remembering the ABA" website.
The link
to Calvin's ABA history is found there as well.

Calvin played for the LA Stars of the old ABA for the
1969-70 season. In 1971, the team moved to Utah and became the Utah Stars. Calvin
Mack was traded shortly after the move to the Florida Floridians for Donnie Freeman. In
1970-71 and 71-72, he was with the Florida Floridians and in 1972-73 he signed with
the Carolina Cougars, playing with them through 1973-74. After a season with the
Cougars, he moved on to the Denver Nuggets for the 1974-75 season, and then a year later,
1975-76 (the last season of the old ABA) he was with the Virginia Squires. Other
familiar names on that Squires team were UCLA's Sven Nater and former Pepperdine head
coach Jan Van Breda Kolff, who is now the head coach at St. Bonaventure.

Not content to just play with the Squires, Calvin got his
first taste of coaching in that last ABA season. In the 1975-76 season, the Squires
employed Al Bianchi, Mack Calvin, Willie Wise, Bill Musselman, Jack Ankerson and Zelmo
Beaty as head coaches...by the time the Squires got around to hiring Beaty, they had
compiled a 6-35 record, so perhaps coaching was not yet an ingrained part of Calvin's
repetoire, and with a record like that, it's little wonder that when the merger of the ABA
and NBA occurred, Virginia was not among the four teams to make it to the more
well-established NBA. .

After the ABA merger, Mack signed with the LA Lakers midway
through the 1976-77 season, playing in 12 games with Los Angeles. Laker fans will remember
that the Lakers that year featured Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Cazzie Russell, Lucius Allen,
Kermit Washington, Earl Tatum, Don Ford, Dwight Lamar, Tom Abernathy, Don Chaney, and
Johnny Neumann, and that Mack averaged 7.9 ppg. He was the second best free throw
shooter (.854) on that team (the leading free-throw shooter was Cazzie Russell) and
free-throw shooting has always been among the skills that Calvin was best at. That
same year, Mack also played for the San Antonio Spurs briefly, before moving back to
Denver for the 1977-78 season. 1977 also saw Calvin's induction into the Long Beach
City College "Alumni Hall of Fame." In 1980, Calvin played for the Utah
Jazz, appearing in 48 games (averaging 6.4 ppg). He finally wound up playing for the
Cleveland Cavaliers for two seasons, from 1981 through 1983, where he finished out his NBA
playing career.

Following his playing career, he had a variety of assistant
coaching jobs, including Calvin one season of experience coaching high school basketball,
compiling a 38-1 record at Cherry Creek (Colo.) in 1986. Somewhere in between coaching at
Cherry Creek and the NBA, he had a stint as an assistant at the University of Virginia.
Eventually he returned to the NBA level, serving as an assistant for the Milwaukee Bucks
under their former head coach Del Harris during the 1988-89 and 1989-90 seasons.
While with the Bucks, Calvin had a chance to coach another SoCal player, Paul
Mokeski, who was instrumental in helping the Bucks defeat the Atlanta Hawks and Terry
Cummings in the 1988-89 first round series decisive 5th game. Of course those
familiar with Mokeski, also know that he attended Encino Crespi and was most recently (for
a short stint) an assistant coach at USC before leaving to coach professionally (as well
as finding himself in other hot water, including an arrest for possession of a controlled
substance). And UCLA fans will recognize that Terry Cummings is of course the father
of current UCLA player TJ Cummings. Calvin stayed with the Bucks through the 1989-90
season, and continued to serve as an assistant under Del Harris, along with other
assistants who included Frank Hamblen and Mike Dunleavy (former Seattle coach and father
of Duke's Mike Dunleavy, Jr.). Among the players on that year's Buck's team were
some other familiar names, including Fred Roberts, Greg Anderson, Jack Sikma, and Ricky
Pierce.

After the Bucks, Calvin became an assistant coach for the LA
Clippers, where he accomplished perhaps his most dubious distinction: Among all the head
coaches and interim coaches the Clippers have had over the life of their franchise (and
there have been a total of 21 head coaches--including those who have repeated in the job
since the 1970 inaugural season), Calvin holds the record for coaching the fewest number
of games of any head coach in the franchise history. He coached just two games
before being relieved of his duties, and of course, he also has the lowest win-loss
record: 1-1. The feat was accomplished during the 1991-92 season, when the Clippers,
tired of head coach Mike Shuler, relieved him after 43 games in to the season.
Interestingly, after Calvin was relieved as head coach, he stayed on with the franchise.
He was replaced as head coach by his old former ABA Carolina Cougars' coach, Larry Brown,
who managed to hang onto the job in LA for two seasons (this, of course, after leaving
UCLA, Kansas, and hopping around the NBA himself just a bit).

After his stint with the Clippers, Calvin was named in
1994-95 as the new head coach and general manager of the Continental Basketball
Association's Mexico City Aztecas. Of course, like a lot of other things the CBA had
planned for itself, the job never quite worked out right and the team quickly folded.
Then, after serving for a time with Upward Bound back in Long Beach, and just
before the 1996-97 college season was set to begin, Calvin was hired as the head coach at
Cal State Dominguez Hills, a Division II program which had done well under former coach
Dave Yanai, who had moved over to Cal State Los Angeles. At the time of his hiring, the
Long Beach Press Telegram published a story on September 29, 1996 about Calvin and his NBA
travels, travails and and the reality that many coaches face when things don't
always work out as they had planned. Here are a few excerpts from that story:

AFTER NBA SNUB, CALVIN TURNS TO DOMINGUEZ HILLS

By Jim McCurdie
Long Beach Press-Telegram

Head coach Mack Calvin. Yeah, he likes the sound of that.
True, he would rather have hung that nameplate somewhere in an NBA arena (the one next
door to the Coliseum comes to mind). But that opportunity never knocked. So Cal State
Dominguez Hills it is. The Toros, an NCAA Division II program with a limited budget
and just a handful of scholarships, were in no position to woo Calvin with a lucrative
contract. But they could offer him the one fringe benefit he craved most.

"They wanted me," he said.

Dave Yanai, coach at Dominguez Hills for 19 years, bolted
for conference rival Cal State Los Angeles in July, leaving his former employers a matter
of weeks to hire his successor. The man they turned to was Calvin, who had begun to think
that the basketball world had no record of all the dues he had paid as an NBA assistant
coach.

Calvin said his failure to land an NBA head coaching job
after coming this close with the Clippers, Dallas Mavericks and Denver Nuggets
"really brought me to my knees." The former Poly High, Long Beach City College
and USC star said the rejections and disappointments of the past few years have changed
him, and forced him to rethink his priorities. "I had always felt that if you
work hard in life and reach a certain point, you should be granted those
opportunities," Calvin said. "It didn't happen for me. I worked hard, I was
recognized in my profession, and it didn't happen. I had to question myself, and learn to
accept life and it's challenges one day at a time."

As for why it didn't happen for him in the NBA...

"I think timing - the right place at the right
time," he said. "And there are probably some mistakes I made. I didn't get the
Clipper head coaching job (in 1992, when the club hired Larry Brown), and I may have said
some things that probably didn't get the approval of management. I had to really learn
from that. I had to mature and grow up. I can say today that I'm a very grateful and
humble person. I take life one day at a time, and try to do the best I can. Where I've
been gives me perspective. Getting knocked on your ass makes you humble."

The past few years have been humbling, indeed. Besides being
passed over for NBA jobs, he and his wife have separated (they remain good friends, Calvin
said), she has undergone a kidney transplant, and he has felt the burden of
"financial pressures" and career gridlock.

His last basketball job was in 1994-95, as coach and general
manager of the Mexico City Aztecas of the Continental Basketball Association. As part of
its plan to take over the world as we know it, the NBA has been eyeing Mexico City as a
potential expansion market. Calvin figured he could carve himself a niche and be a part of
an NBA franchise there when one arrived.

"Of course, it just fell on its face," Calvin
said. The Mexican peso went belly-up, and so did the Aztecas.

And while he looked at the Dominguez Hills job as a chance
at a fresh start, it was short-lived. After just one season, Calvin was replaced by
Larry Hauser, a former 14-year assistant coach at Santa Clara who was hired to replace
Calvin during the summer of 1977.

So where has Calvin been since leaving Cal State University
Dominguez Hills? Well, that's kind of hard to say. Calvin is currently a color
commentator for basketball games on FoxSports West and announced two Dominguez games this
past season.. According to the LA Times' account, Calvin has reportedly declined two
recent NBA offers, one as an assistant and the other as a scout. And, according to
Bolch's story in the Times, he's been tending to the care of two elderly friends, a widow
and her brother who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. "Calvin befriended Ruth
Smith, 88, and her brother, James Brooks, 86, several years ago, around the time that
Smith's husband died. Calvin visits from his Marina del Rey home several times a
week."

Other than occasional scouting, color commentating, and some
coaching here and there though, Calvin has been eyeing the the Compton Dominguez HS job at
least since it was vacated by Otis. Interviewed back in March of 2001 by the
Press-Telegram, the 54-year old former coach and player told Ted Kian at that time:
"I enjoy coaching high school. Coaching young players is the most gratifying
experience I've ever had in coaching. Seeing young players develop as people and providing
them with solid role models is very important to me. Dominguez is a program that intrigues
me."